Fire!

Here’s a little story to underscore my interest in Uninterrupted Power Supplies.

The Rocket Blue Automation office is high up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, above Boulder. It is literally at the end of the power line. Now, it stands to reason that as you get further away from the power plant, you have more reliability problems. That is – the power tends to go out more often.

But early this week we faced a different king of threat. We had to suddenly evacuate the office because of a forest fire! Fortunately, the power stayed on in my neighborhood. However, there were areas about 5 miles away where the power went out because the Cold Springs fire burnt right through the power poles!

During the mandatory fire evacuation, I was still able to monitor the “health” of my office because of web cams and various environmental sensors. Matter of fact, you can see the same real time view I see from my office window at http://lazyz.org/ .

We live in the most fascinating time in history. Now us ordinary mortals have such the ability to see, hear, sense and even “be” in more than one place at a time. But this “power” requires that we make sure our various IoT devices are powered up.